W403 ADVANCED POETRY WRITING
Cathy Bowman
PREREQUISITE: W303. Permission of instructor.
7002 - 2:30p-3:45p TR (15 students) 3 cr.
TOPIC: “Documentary Poetry”
In this advanced creative writing workshop we will act as
documentary makers through the writing of our poems, the poem as a
lyric, narrative, and dramatic documentation of our public and
private lives. We will come at poetry writing with the idea that it
offers us an alternative kind of telling, another way to get the
news. We will write poems based on interviews, research, archives,
found objects, dream states, diaries, divination and various forms
of knowledge and play. We will explore the ways that conditions of
joy and sorrow, and story can be explored through sound. We will
take these resources both personal and public and sculpt and shape
them into our own poems. We will discuss these poems in class and
work on revision. In this workshop we will attempt to merge everyday
life, current events, and historical movements with a deep attention
to craft and language. There will be a final presentation project
that involves shaping research, interviews and oral history into a
series of poems.
Permission of the instructor required.